The Peculiarities of Yearning is a collection of flash fiction and short stories that uses strange scenarios to explore how human longings are repressed and revealed.
This collection includes stories that have won or been shortlisted in competitions including Bristol Short Story Prize, Bath Short Story Award, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Exeter Story Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award.
Stephanie’s work has been pushed by Ellipsis several times since we launched in 2017. You can read that work via the following links: Expedition, Place I Find My Daugher and Myself and Hall of Mirrors: Aspects of the wrier-self in fiction. To whet your appetite for this full collection, you can read a brief extract from ‘Born From Red’ below, which was previously published in Bristol Short Story Prize anthology.
Born From Red
The school is on lock-down for a random colour check and I hear whispers that Leila has climbed out of the bathroom window, taking her painted toenails to safety. The rule is absolute; we must not see red.
Carty dives deep in her stories. The stories are a tightrope of psychology and its impact on the body. In sharp prose, girls live in a world without red, natural laws transform, the dead are preserved, DNA disobeys, babies are kept in stasis. Dark, astute and always surprising, this is utterly fascinating writing. Yearning has never been so good.
Angela Readman, author of Don’t Try This at Home and Something Like Breathing
Carty’s beguiling and lyrical prose is displayed perfectly in this inventive and varied collection that runs the gamut of human emotions. Shocking, witty, sad and funny, these are stories that show humanity at its best and worst.
Lucie McKnight Hardy, author of Dead Relatives and Water Shall Refuse Them
The Peculiarities of Yearning is available to buy via Reflex Press: https://www.reflex.press/product/the-peculiarities-of-yearning/
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Biography
Stephanie Carty is a writer and Consultant Clinical Psychologist / NHS Head of Psychology in the UK. Her short fiction is widely published. She has been placed and shortlisted for many competitions including the Bristol Short Story Prize, Bath Short Story Award, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award and Bridport Prize. Her novella-in-flash Three Sisters of Stone won Best Novella in the Saboteur Awards 2019.
